Grifols Accelerated Biopharma Sales Success by Driving Salesforce Adoption With Whatfix

The Challenge

Salesforce End-Users Struggled to Adopt Salesforce and Its Workflows, Hurting Sales Performance

Grifols is a global pharmaceutical company, a leader in plasma-derived and transfusion medicine across 110+ countries. It’s focused on treating conditions across a range of therapeutic areas, including neurology, immunology, and pulmonology.

Grifols’ US-based biopharma sales team included 250 salespeople. It relied on Salesforce Lightning and Service Cloud to centralize customer information, support a quicker time-to-market, nurture customer relationships, and grow accounts.

However, the sales team struggled with Salesforce’s features, functionality, and custom-built workflows due to the depth of Salesforce functionality and Grifols’ highly-customized Salesforce configuration. For example, they were unclear about which steps to take once a new biopharma sales lead was created and struggled to update accounts.

This hurt sales productivity and this uncertainty cascaded into a high caseload for the CRM support and training team tasked with educating new and existing Salesforce end-users.

“Before Whatfix, I spent an average of 40 minutes on each Salesforce support case, creating screenshots or talking people through a process,” exlpained Michelle Brophy, CRM Global Biopharma Specialist at Grifols.

New sellers received only six hours of Salesforce training and struggled to use the contextual processes critical to success in the individual roles.

“We couldn’t realistically expect to onboard new hires to Salesforce in just six hours. They needed extra content and support,” said Brophy.

The Solution

Whatfix Enabled Sellers to Focus on Biopharma Sales Development and Achieving Goals With In-App Assistance and Support

Grifols was introduced to Whatfix at Dreamforce. It soon re-modeled its Salesforce training and support with Whatfix.

“We discovered Whatfix at Dreamforce and quickly realized real-time digital guidance could transform how users engaged with Salesforce Lightning and Service Cloud. Whatfix’s no-code DAP was simple, powerful, and personalized to every user,” said Brophy.

Live for four years, Whatfix’s in-app guidance and end-user support platform enabled sellers with simple, interactive, step-by-step guidance and on-demand support, all in the flow of work. Users no longer needed to leave Salesforce to find answers to questions or locate sales enablement-related SOPs.

Brophy and her team re-imagined all documentation processes with interactive, in-app Flows that guided sellers through each step in Grifols’ contextual Salesforce processes. They created multi-step in-app walkthroughs, as well as converted them into PDFs and videos, of the training documentation – all without coding or other deep-dive technical skills.

“Sellers are more proficient in Salesforce now, so they can spend more time on nurturing new biopharma sales opportunities. Instead of wasting time asking around for help, they can use the in-app training to manage leads, contacts, and customers within Salesforce. Ultimately Whatfix helped Grifols close more pharma sales opportunities and deliver a better customer experience,” said Brophy.

Using Whatfix User Actions, Grifols tracked custom user actions and events and analyzed end-user behavior in Salesforce Grifols extracted Salesforce end-user behavioral actions to identify successful vs. unsuccessful Self Help searches. This empowered Grifols with a data-driven approach to understand where its sellers were experiencing process friction and highlight areas in its sales processes where additional support was needed.

With this data, Grifols engaged with its development team to adapt and optimize its Salesforce processes. They also created new multiformat in-app content to guide users in these areas of friction.

Whatfix also improved Salesforce’s feature adoption and overall user engagement. Grifols discovered that some biopharma sales leads were left unopened in Salesforce for years, hurting win rates and potentially missing high-intent opportunities.

Before implementing Whatfix, an automated email would be sent to sellers notifying them of new or unopened leads, but these emails were frequently overlooked. With Whatfix, sellers were alerted to unopened and new leads with an in-app Pop-Up, which prompted sellers to check leads. When end-users clicked on the Pop-Up, an in-app Flow guided sellers through the contextual next steps on what to do with the information

The Results

Whatfix Enabled Salesforce End-Users With Better Sales Technology Experiences, Driving Higher Biopharma Sales Win Rates

Whatfix empowered Grifols with the data to identify areas of friction in its sales workflows, as well as the in-app guidance and support to overcome these friction areas to enable sellers and maximize sales potential. With Whatfix, Grifols accomplished many goals and drove sales results, including:

• Achieved a 3x return on its Salesforce investment: Grifols reduced training and support costs by $107,000 by reducing tickets and using multi-format, in-app content.
• Saved 400+ hours on end-user training and support-related issues within seven months of implementing Whatfix.
• Influenced higher biopharma sales win rates, shortened time-to-resolution, and improved service quality.
• Reduced volume of CRM support cases by 22% (from 315 last year to 246 this year). Salesforce end-users are now more self-sufficient in finding answers to their questions in the flow of work.
• Lowered dependency on its training team. Last year, Brophy’s CRM training team directed sellers to Whatfix content 114 times, vs 19 times in 2023, suggesting its Salesforce end-users were confident using in-app support without seeking additional help.
• Increased Salesforce Lightning and Service Cloud adoption. For example, over a three month period last year there were 25 searches relating to lead conversion. This year, using Whatfix, there were 18 – a 28% reduction.
• Delivered faster new seller onboarding in Salesforce that reduced time-to-proficiency for newer employees. For example, the six hours of on-demand video training available in Whatfix means users no longer devote a full day to live training (once travel time is included). It also eliminates the travel cost.
• Simplified new hire training with more contextual, engaging, and effective training content.
• Simultaneously, created multi-format help content and documentation such as walkthroughs, pdfs, and videos.
• Simplified users’ ability to access and locate documentation.

“Our salespeople are more empowered now. During new hire training, for example, we drill into every candidate that Whatfix is there to help them navigate Salesforce. Make no mistake, Whatfix is an essential part of our sales strategy,” said Brophy.